You may or may not be aware of the 1988 film Cocktail starring Tom Cruise, Elizabeth Shue and Bryan Brown. Billed as a romantic comedy-drama, it tells the story of a “business student who takes up bartending in order to make ends meet”.
It is, by most people’s barometers, a dreadful film:
There are no surprises in Cocktail, a shallow, dramatically inert romance that squanders Tom Cruise’s talents in what amounts to a naive barkeep’s banal fantasy
Rotten Tomatoes
However, after I watched it on VHS in the early 1990s, I was definitely not in the naysayer camp. In fact, the film had quite an impact on me. But, it wasn’t the bartending high jinks of Tom Cruise (as Brian Flanagan) or Elisabeth Shue’s down-to-earth portrayal of the preposterously named artist Jordan Mooney that was responsible. No, the thing that stood out for me was Bryan Brown’s performance as bartending mentor (stay with me) Doug Coughlin. Early on in the film, Doug relates some advice in his first interaction with Brian which he calls Coughlin’s Law:
Anything else is always something better
While not particularly profound, Coughlin’s Law serves its purpose in the film. However, what truly captured my attention—for reasons I still can’t fully explain—was Bryan Brown’s distinctive Australian baritone as he intoned the phrase ‘Coughlin’s Law’.
Whenever I hear anyone reference a law that relates to the type of work I do (I’m talking your Conway’s, your Parkinson’s and your Brooks’*), I can’t help but think about Doug Coughlin (RIP, sorry spoiler alert) schooling earnest Brian Flanagan in how to make an Amaretto Sour.
So, in what clearly appears to be an excuse for me to waffle on about 1980’s pop culture, I actually wanted to postulate some of my observations (that could be laws if you squint really hard) that apply to software development. With tongue firmly in cheek, here are 5 irreverent laws that I believe to be true:
- Confluence page sophistication is a leading indicator of delivery problems
- Value delivery decreases as Jira instance customisation increases
- An organisation’s dysfunction is directly proportional to the amount of time spent discussing ‘ways of working’
- As asynchronous communication becomes more polarised, use of the winking emoji 😉 seems more and more condescending
- Individuals often pretend to have long-standing opinions or insights, when in reality it’s their first time expressing them**
* (Not Coughlin’s) Law reminders (I had to look up the name of #2… again):
- Conway’s Law: organisations design systems that mirror their own communication structure
- Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion
- Brooks’ Law: adding more people to a ‘late’ software project makes it later
** An example: whenever someone joins a discussion opening with “I’ve been saying for ages…”, this is — in all likelihood — probably the first time they’ve said it…